A War Without Borders

By Bill Powell

The last time Ashraf Daas and his new bride Nadia Alami saw their fathers alive was one of the happiest moments of their lives. They had just posed for wedding photos last Wednesday evening outside the Philadelphia ballroom of the Radisson SAS Hotel in the center of Amman, the capital of Jordan. Ashraf and Nadia were about to enter the ballroom, where 250 people waited to greet them. Mingling among the guests was a man who witnesses later said was in his 20s. A few minutes before 9 p.m., he detonated a suicide belt hidden under a jacket, turning the celebration into a scene of carnage. In the chaos, Daas's father lay motionless, bleeding from his mouth. His son tried to resuscitate him to no avail. The next day many of the wedding guests attended the funeral for Daas's father, held at a cemetery 20 minutes from the Radisson. Nadia's father was buried Saturday.

They were not the only mourners burying their dead in Amman last week. At almost the exact time on Wednesday, another suicide bomber blew himself up in the lobby of the Grand Hyatt Hotel. A third bomber detonated just outside the entrance to a Days Inn; had he made it inside, he probably would have killed dozens of official visitors who were part of a delegation from China. The attacks left at least 57 people dead, making them the most devastating terrorist strikes in Jordan's history, and set off reverberations throughout the Middle East. Responsibility for the attacks was claimed in an Internet posting by Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian who runs al-Qaeda's operations in Iraq. The posting asserted that all three bombers and a woman it claimed was part of the team were Iraqis. Jordanian officials said Saturday the bombers were all non-Jordanians but denied that a woman was involved. The message from al-Qaeda justified the attacks, saying the targets were chosen because they are frequented by foreigners en route to Iraq, which in al-Zarqawi's view makes such locales "centers for launching war on Islam." The attacks also represented a chilling milestone: if al-Zarqawi was indeed behind them, they would mark the first time his network has pulled off a major terrorist attack outside Iraq. Major General Rick Lynch, a coalition spokesman in Baghdad, said the bombings are "an indication of al-Qaeda in Iraq spreading across the region."

While insurgent sources in Iraq told TIME they had no prior knowledge of the Amman attacks, the fact that al-Zarqawi would strike Jordan wasn't surprising. U.S. military officials have viewed Jordan as an inevitable target for al-Zarqawi in his effort to export jihad outside Iraq. Jordan's King Abdullah II has longstanding ties to the U.S. (he went to junior high at the Eaglebrook School in Massachusetts and prep school at Deerfield Academy) and has quietly supported the U.S. war effort, despite its deep unpopularity with the Jordanian public. Jordan is a staging ground for the private contractors supplying and working with U.S. forces in Iraq. More crucially, it is where U.S. officers carry out what is, in Washington's eyes, one of the most vital tasks of the war: the training of new Iraqi military and security forces, whose viability is essential to the U.S.'s exit strategy in Iraq. "Jordan has been very, very close to us and a remarkable help in Iraq," says a senior U.S. military official.

But that relationship has also made the kingdom more vulnerable. The western portion of Iraq is infused with insurgents, and the border with Jordan is relatively porous. "When al-Zarqawi sent operatives from Afghanistan, his rate of success in infiltrating them into Jordan was 10% to 15%," says a Jordanian security official. "Now it is much easier: with a fake passport, you cross the border, and the same day you are in Amman." Jordan's security officials estimate that more than 500 Jordanians have been arrested for links with al-Zarqawi's organization. A security official says al-Zarqawi's recruiters operate throughout Jordan, playing on common Islamic sentiment that Muslims should help expel U.S. "occupation" forces from Iraq. But Jordanian security officials say al-Zarqawi is also believed to be signing up Jordanians to go to Iraq for training and then to return home to mount operations against Jordan--in effect, to help grow the business so that it doesn't suffocate and die in Iraq.

Al-Zarqawi has a personal interest in sowing chaos in Jordan. He was raised in a gritty industrial town in northern Jordan, where his family still lives, and has been a sworn enemy of the Hashemite monarchy for more than a decade. After training in al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan in the late 1980s, he returned to Jordan a fierce adherent to the radical Salafi school of Islam. In 1994 al-Zarqawi was arrested for and eventually convicted of forming an illegal jihadist organization and possessing explosives; he was released in a general amnesty in 1999 and almost immediately began plotting to punish the Hashemite monarchy. In 2000 he was convicted in absentia for a plot to bomb several tourist sites in Amman during the millennium celebration, including the Radisson that he finally hit last week. Intelligence officials believe his group was behind the 2002 murder of U.S. diplomat Laurence Foley in Amman. And Jordanian security says that last year it broke up an al-Zarqawi plan to use 20 tons of chemical weapons in an attack in Jordan.

Signs that al-Zarqawi is widening his campaign could spur Arab governments to do more to help the U.S. find and kill the Qaeda kingpin, who already has a $25 million bounty on his head, the same as had been offered for Osama bin Laden's. Jordanian security officials tell TIME that the Amman attacks show that al-Zarqawi's organization is only getting stronger as the Iraq war goes on. The officials estimate that 80% of al-Zarqawi's force in Iraq is made up of Iraqis, including many former members of Saddam Hussein's elite Republican Guard, some of whom joined the Islamists and became jobless after the toppling of Saddam's regime. "Zarqawi still has a capability," says Lynch, the coalition spokesman in Baghdad, "and never have we said we've taken away that capability."

If anything encouraging came out of last week's atrocities, it was the outrage with which Jordanians responded--the latest sign that al-Zarqawi's murderous tactics may be forcing Muslims to confront the threat he poses to their societies. In the days after the bombings, thousands took to the streets to vent their anger--a relatively rare spectacle in the Islamic world since Sept. 11, 2001. BURN IN HELL ABU MOUSAB AL-ZARQAWI read a typical poster. On Thursday even al-Zarqawi's sister-in-law was distressed by the attacks. "What I saw on TV yesterday did not please me," she said. By Saturday, Jordanian authorities had arrested at least 14 people suspected of aiding the three bombers in the attacks. At the Days Inn, another couple, Shukri Azar and Heba Ghazale, decided to hold their wedding only 48 hours after three people had died in the bombing there. "We are up to the challenge," Heba said as she stepped out of a limousine near the spot where one of the suicide bombers had detonated. "We want to celebrate. The terrorists will not change our lives."

With reporting by SCOTT MACLEOD/AMMAN, Saad Hattar/Amman, Michael Ware/Baghdad, Sally B. Donnelly/Washington, Timothy J. Burger/Washington